HC hands over Ayesha Meera case to CBI

HYDERABAD: Nearly 11 years after the rape and murder of B Pharmacy student Ayesha Meera in her Ibrahimpatnam hostel at Vijayawada, Hyderabad High Court on Thursday entrusted the case to CBI, asking it to get to the bottom of the matter and nail the real culprits. The SIT investigating the case has been asked to hand it over to CBI, which is free to use the material collected by the SIT so far. The bench of Chief Justice TB Radhakrishnan and Justice SV Bhatt pronounced this order after hearing the plea of Ayesha's parents, who were seeking a CBI probe into the matter because the "AP police never made any serious effort to nab the real killers and instead implicated an innocent in the case, ostensibly to save the culprits". Shocked by SIT's revelation that trial court records and material objects pertaining to the case were destroyed in 2014 itself, even before HC could decide the appeal filed by the convict in the case, the bench last month directed its registrar general to conduct a probe and furnish a report on who was responsible for the conspiracy.

HC orders 2 sets of FIRThe registrar general’s report, presented in court on Thursday, contains allegations against officials and staff of judiciary, who allowed records to be destroyed. This had a huge impact on HC bench, which ordered a CBI probe into it. “Book two FIRs, one on the murder and the other on the case records destruction,” the bench told the CBI. “Personnel working with the judiciary are not rendering mere service. They are expected to be persons of integrity,” the bench said. Asked whether Ayesha’s parents were offered any financial assistance by the state, their counsel D Suresh Kumar told the court that they had rejected all such offers and were seeking only justice and nothing else.